street, reloading fast whenever their clips clicked dry. They shot pregnant women. And laughed as they did it. I stayed where I was by the Humvee, my rifle in the truck. I couldn’t believe what they were doing. I thought it was a bad dream. But I couldn’t stop them. They would have turned around and shot me too.’
He blinked, tears in his eyes.
‘A lot of the women and kids tried to run to the hills for cover, but they were all mown down. The pair of them must have killed close to thirty, forty people, probably more. All of them women and children apart from three guards.’
The room was silent.
‘Afterwards, when everyone around us was either dead or dying and their bloodlust was satisfied, both of them began to realise what they had just done. They started to panic. Carver said we should head straight back to camp and pretend it never happened. Deny all responsibility. He said he could get us out of it, and would come up with some back-up plan that could cover us. So we jumped in the Humvee, turned around and left as quickly as we came. Leaving behind a camp littered with dead bodies and soaked in blood.’
He swallowed.
‘But we never made it back. The last surviving guard or someone else must have called in the attack over a radio from somewhere. Our Humvee got hit by a bazooka as we were driving back to Bondsteel and the next thing I knew we were captured.’
‘By who?’ Archer asked. ‘The KLA?’
Fletcher shook his head.
‘Yes and no. Technically they were KLA at the time. They were a renegade Special Forces Unit. I found out later that the KLA expelled them after the war for stuff they did.’
‘Why were they expelled?’
Fletcher blinked.
‘War crimes. Back at Bondsteel, we’d all heard tales about them. They were called the Black Panthers. Entire Serbian villages were being found deserted in the area, clothes and possessions still inside the houses. Everyone gone, vanished, no blood, no bodies, no traces, never seen or heard from again. That was their handiwork. No one knew why or what had happened to the people. Word had spread. They were close to being expelled by the time they kidnapped us, but later the KLA commanders said they were too savage for their organisation, that their interests weren’t the same as the liberation’s anymore.’
He paused.
‘The Black Panthers. Albanian Special Forces. Some of the toughest bastards on the planet. And it turned out the people in the camp we murdered were their wives and children.’
FIFTEEN
A long silence followed as everyone in the room absorbed what Fletcher had just said. In the bed, the man's eyes were vacant, like looking at two windows with nothing beyond, his mind taken back all those years to that terrible night.
Eventually, Cobb broke the silence. This was all news to him too. Across the room Jackson was leaning against the desktop by the television, his arms folded, his head down.
He already knew all about this.
He knew what was coming next.
‘So what happened?’ Cobb asked. As he spoke, he glanced over at the American, but the CIA agent kept looking at the floor, avoiding eye contact.
'They took us back to their camp, tied us up, then beat the shit out of us,' Fletcher said. 'The whole group, punching, stamping, pistol-whipping. I thought I was going to die. They almost killed us there and then. Broke my nose and both my orbital bones. Broke Carver's arm. But then their Captain appeared. Most intimidating guy I'd ever seen. He was huge, camo paint covering his face, big AK in his hands. Even through the darkness and the paint, I could see the rage in his eyes. He looked at me and I almost pissed myself with fear. He ordered his men to do something in Albanian, and the next thing I knew we were thrown into one of the huts and locked up.’
He paused.
‘So what happened?’ Archer asked.
‘They left us for a day. They even fed us, and gave us water. But then one of them walked in and said we were going to play a game. He was a big guy, almost as big as their leader. I think he was his right-hand man. He had big spider tattoos on his elbows. He spoke in English. He said the game was called eeenie-meenie-miny-mo. The guy did it with his finger, and it came to a rest on me.'
He swallowed.
'Straight afterwards his men dragged me outside